Los Altos Food Products, owned by Raul Andrade and his family, is expanding from 36,000-square-foot factory to a new 100,000-square-foot facility a few blocks away. Demand for the company’s cheese is growing, particularly for their Cotija-style cheese, one of Mexico’s most famous flavors.
In rural Mexico, there is a tiny town at the base of the Southern Sierra Madres called Cotija – a quiet place where herds of cattle fan out into green mountain canyons. In those hilly places, dairymen for 200 years have made Mexico’s most famous cheese – Cotija.
Summer rains each year wash out dirt roads into Cotija, so ranchers let their cheese sit for months until the rain stops and the roads are safe, which gives the cheese its pungent, hard character. The difficult rainy times, experts say, caused Cotija cheese to become the most recognizable cheese in Mexico.
Latino-style cheeses are one of the nation’s fastest-growing cheese categories, according to the California Milk Advisory Board.
Read the a more complete story of the Andrade family here.